12/26/2023
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11/20/2023
The Medlock Post Ep. 37 Special Thanksgiving Message
The Medlock Post Ep. 37 Special Thanksgiving Message
Gratitude in all circumstances: Susan Evans McCloud
What is “thanks-giving”? What is gratitude? And,
beyond them, what is rejoicing?
Rejoicing is a state of spirit, a state of being, more
expansive than just a state of mind. In its purity it is the eternal in man
reaching toward deity. And, as he approaches his Father, learns of him, and
becomes like him, he experiences a state of rejoicing, or joy.
Psalms 37:4 encourages readers to “delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart." That is a rather compelling promise. In Deuteronomy, we are encouraged to “rejoice in every good thing” (Deuteronomy 26:11). By opening their hearts, people can notice and recognize the things of beauty and goodness around them that bring delight, that lift their hearts from pathways of discouragement and doubt.
10/24/2023
America’s Crisis in Faith by Jonathan Turley
America's Crisis in Faith: Polls Reveal Americans are Rejecting the Constitution and Embracing Violence
Below is my column in Fox.com on the poll released last week showing an increasing number of citizens have lost faith in our constitutional system and now view violence as warranted to silence those with opposing views. It is a crisis of faith that represents the greatest possible threat to our Republic. The loss of faith and fealty constitutes one of the greatest crises that our nation has faced since its foundation. Here is the column:
A recent startling poll shows that a majority of voters not only view the opposing party as a threat to the nation but justifying violence to combat their agenda. The poll captures a crisis of faith that I have been writing about for over a decade as an academic and a commentator. Many now question democracy as a sustainable system of government. It represents the single greatest threat to this nation: a citizenry that has lost faith not just with our system of government but with each other.
The polls by the University of Virginia Center for Politics shows a nation at war with itself. Fifty-two percent of Biden supporters say Republicans are now a threat to American life while 47 percent of Trump supporters say the same about Democrats.
Among Biden supporters, 41 percent now believe violence is justified “to stop [Republicans] from achieving their goals.” An almost identical percentage, 38 percent, of Trump supporters now embrace violence to stop Democrats.
Not surprisingly, many of these people have lost faith in democracy. Some 31 percent of Trump supporters believe that the nation should explore alternative forms of government. Roughly a quarter (24 percent) of Biden supporters also question the viability of democracy.
Faith is the one thing that no system of government can do without. Without faith in the underlying values of a constitutional system, authority rests on a mix of coercion and capitulation.
For years, I have written about this growing loss of faith and how it has been fueled by our intellectual and political elites. In the echo chamber of news and social media, citizens constantly hear how the opposing party is composed of “traitors” and how the constitutional system works to protect enemies of the people.
Viewers now get a steady diet of figures like MSNBC commentator Elie Mystal who called the U.S. Constitution “trash” and argued that we should simply just dump it.
In a New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the Constitution to be “radically altered” to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
Georgetown University Law School Professor Rosa Brooks went on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” to lash out at Americans becoming “slaves” to the U.S. Constitution and that the Constitution itself is now the problem for the country.
They are part of the radical chic that has become the norm in academia — and widely embraced by the media.
According to these law professors the problem is not just our Constitution, but constitutionalism in general.
Others have argued that key protections or institutions should just be ignored. In a recent open letter, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet and San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin called upon President Joe Biden to defy rulings of the Supreme Court that he considers “mistaken” in the name of “popular constitutionalism.”
“Popular constitutionalism” appears a form of discretionary or ad hoc compliance with constituitional law. If only “popular” constitutional rules are followed, the Constitution itself becomes a mere pretense for whatever the shifting majority or forming mob demands.
Politicians have also contributed to this crisis of faith in challenging constitutional values or core institutions. Members like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has questioned the need for a Supreme Court.
Others like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) have called for the packing of the Supreme Court to simply create an immediate liberal majority.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) thrilled his base by going to the steps of the Supreme Court to declare “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
It is little surprise that one man showed up at the home of Justice Bret Kavanaugh to kill him for his “awful decisions.”
Conversely, former President Donald Trump has regularly denounced his political opponents as “traitors” and “enemies of the people.” He recently declared “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”
With leaders engaging in such reckless rhetoric, it is hardly surprising that the Constitution itself is now viewed as threat to our nation rather than the very thing that defines us. It is designed to restrain the majority and protect those who are the least popular in our society.
In the end, a constitution remains a covenant not between citizens and their government but between each other as citizens. It demands a leap of faith; a commitment that despite our differences we will defend the rights of our neighbors.
If nothing else, the Constitution has one thing to recommend it: we are still here. It is a Constitution that has survived economic and political upheavals. It survived a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands were killed.
It is not a particularly poetic document. It was written by the ultimate wonk, James Madison. If you want truly inspirational prose, try any of the French constitutions. Of course, they had more practice since they regularly failed. Other countries based their constitutions on aspirational statements of the values that we shared. The Madisonian system spent as much time on what divided us; it not only recognized the danger of factions but created a system to bring such divisions to the surface where they could be addressed.
The danger of other systems was realized when these divisions were left below the surface where they would fester and explode in the streets of Paris. The American Constitution allowed for a type of controlled implosion toward the center of the system; these factional interests would be expressed and vented in the legislative branch. The Madisonian system does not hide our divisions; it invites their expression.
The question is whether we have reached a time when the things that divide us will now overcome what unites us. This is not our first age of rage. Indeed, at the start of our Republic, rivaling parties were not just figuratively trying to kill each other; they were actually trying to kill each other through laws like the Alien and Sedition Acts. Thomas Jefferson would refer to the term of his predecessor John Adams as “the reign of the witches.”
Yet, that history is no guarantee that it can survive our current age of rage. The relentless attacks on the constitution from the political, media, and academic elite has turned many into constitutional atheists. Yet, the future of our constitutional system may rest with the rising number of constitutional agnostics — those citizens who are simply disconnected or disinterested in the defense of our founding principles.
Philosopher John Stuart Mill warned in 1867 that all it takes for evil to prevail is for “good men [to] look on and do nothing.” We are now in an existential struggle to preserve the values that founded the most successful constitutional system in the history of the world. It is our legacy that now can be either boldly defended by a grateful people or lost in the whimper of a disinterested generation.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University.
9/07/2023
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The Medlock Post Ep. 10 Pt. 1
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Are the Objectives of the Founding Fathers still in the hearts and minds of our nation’s government today?
8/30/2023
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8/28/2023
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7/31/2023
Devon Archer's Biden Bombshells Start Dropping So We Need to Start Educating by JD Rucker
We're just getting started and they're already blockbusters. Granted, most of it is stuff we already knew but hearing from a first-hand source will make it harder for corporate media to ignore. They'll still try, but this has an opportunity to spread to "normies" through other means.
Then again, it may be wishful thinking on my part. But since I don't believe in hope without action, I figure the best thing we can do is to get the word out to everyone we know whether they're skeptical of the Biden Crime Family or not. In short, it's time to start educating the "normies" ourselves, so here are a couple of resources to help.
Let's start with Miranda Devine's Tweets since she's been on top of the story from the beginning:
Devon Archer’s testimony today is bombshell: • Hunter Biden’s ex BFF testified that the value of adding Hunter Biden to Burisma’s board was “the brand” and confirmed that then-Vice President Joe Biden brought the most value to “the brand.” Archer also stated that Burisma would have gone under if not for “the brand.”
In December 2015, Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, an executive of Burisma, placed constant pressure on Hunter Biden to get help from D.C. regarding the Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. Shokin was investigating Burisma for corruption. Hunter Biden, along with Zlochevsky and Pozharski, “called D.C.” to discuss the matter. Biden, Zlochevsky, and Pozharski stepped away to take make the call.
How Our Culture Disempowers Teens by Kerry McDonald
Teenagers are extraordinarily capable.
Louis Braille invented his language for the blind when he was 15. Mary Shelley, daughter of libertarian feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote Frankenstein when she was 18. As a young teen, Anne Frank documented her life of hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Prize at 17.
The Impact of Low Expectations
These are remarkable people for sure, but teenagers are able to accomplish remarkable things when given freedom and opportunity. Instead, our culture systematically underestimates teenagers, coddling them like toddlers, confining them to ever more schooling, and disconnecting them from the adult world they will soon enter.
Our low expectations of teenagers create a vicious circle. We think teenagers are lazy, unmotivated, and incapable of directing their own lives, so we restrict their freedom and micromanage them. This process leads teenagers to believe that they are, in fact, lazy, unmotivated, and in need of micromanagement. According to Peter Berg, author of The Tao of Teenagers and a teacher who has worked with teenagers for over 25 years, this circle emerges because many of us were treated this way as teenagers. We may have a hard time trusting teens because we ourselves were not trusted. Berg tells me:
The Medlock Post Ep. 170: Patriotism, Freedom, and Truth
The Medlock Post Ep. 170: Patriotism, Freedom, and Truth
Trump and Netanyahu as archenemies of the ‘deep state’ and its politicized justice
About every day we see in the news media something like this:
Trump faces additional charges in Mar-a-Lago documents case
Netanyahu Charges Take Israel into Unchartered Waters
What is going on? Trump and Netanyahu were using the same governing tools as their predecessors – the tools which may look like corruption for those who are not familiar with the inner corruptive works of the government and its politicized judiciary. But they are treated not as their predecessors – they are treated as archenemies of the State.
Why? – Because the politicized judicial actions against Trump and Netanyahu masquerade the true reason behind the hate of Trump and Netanyahu. And the true reason is the ‘Deep State’ sees Trump and Netanyahu as defenders and protectors of Traditional Israel and Traditional America which are the real enemies of the ‘Deep State.’
7/30/2023
Are Your Beliefs Rational? Four Tests to Evaluate Your Worldview by Aletheia Hitz
Theologian and philosopher Richard J. Mouw recounts once seeing a car with a Playboy bunny sticker on the rear window and a statue of the Virgin Mary on the front dashboard. He initially assumed that there was a reasonable explanation to the apparent contradiction: a Catholic wife and a brazen spouse, perhaps? Only later did he realize that the dichotomy might not have had a rational explanation. The car’s owner may have neglected, as many do, to critically examine his worldview.
A worldview, as the name implies, is simply the way in which one person views the world. It generally encompasses five main areas: theology (beliefs about God), anthropology (beliefs about man), epistemology (beliefs about acquiring knowledge), metaphysics (beliefs about the nature of reality), and ethics (beliefs about morality).
Everyone has a worldview: We all have beliefs about God, man, knowledge, reality, and morality. However, some worldviews fail to make sense of central aspects of truth. And yet, it’s important to have a worldview that can stand up to scrutiny. From philosopher Ronald H. Nash’s book Life’s Ultimate Questions, here are four tests to verify the validity of a worldview.
I’d Rather Raise Kids with Rich Hearts Than Rich Bank Accounts
I saw this great quote from Danielle Sherman-Lazar of Living Full. It said, “I’d rather my kids be the ones who’re average in school and sports but hold the door open for a teacher with too much in her hands. Comfort a crying classmate. Invite everyone to their table. I want my kids to be the kind kids above anything else. Because that’s how they’ll change the world.
A Time for Greatness, Courage, and Moderation by Daniel J. Mahoney
Our dark hour calls for a recovery of the statesman’s virtues.
The inheritance we defend—that noble civilizational patrimony that helps define the West and America—is not good simply because it is old or because it is ours. But it is wisdom tried and true. As a result, we know that we can never begin anew with some revolutionary “Year Zero.” The destructive zealots and ideologues among the French Revolutionaries did that, displaying deadly contempt for Burke’s more capacious understanding of a primordial contract that connects the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. As a tradition dedicated to human liberty, the Western tradition is dynamic and expansive, yet it has ample room for true pietas. As the French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote so eloquently in his 1955 classic, Sovereignty: An Inquiry Into the Political Good: “[E]very individual with a spark of imagination feels deeply indebted to many others, the living and the dead, the known and the unknown…. The wise man knows himself for debtor, and his actions will be inspired by a deep sense of obligation.”
Reason and experience alike testify that men and women become monsters when they confuse themselves with gods beholden to nothing or no one. In our times that conceit has led to utopian dreams and murderous rage, or to petty souls who rest content with what Blaise Pascal vividly called “licking the earth.” Real human freedom and dignity need to be nourished by a deep sense of obligation, starting with our forebears, without whom we would not be or have anything at all. Natural piety, however, is not solely focused on the past: it lifts our gaze further outside ourselves to the mysterious givenness of the natural order. It is open to the grace that lifts our spirits and allows us to experience the presence of the Living God. Only by acknowledging our considerable debts to our forebears, to ennobling tradition, and to the natural and divine sources of our dignity as human beings, are we rendered capable of achieving great and good things in our turn.
7/29/2023
Top 10 headlines the media didn't tell you this week
Top 10 headlines the media didn't tell you this week,
10. Suspicious circumstances surround tight-lipped Obama Chef drowning case. 9. Rep. James Comer says President Biden uses offshore bank accounts to hide bribe money. 8. Early reports reveal Pfizer was aware of Myocarditis side effects, yet rushed distribution of their COVID vaccine anyway. 7. Biden's DOJ drops campaign finance charges connecting their second largest donor, Sam Bankman-Fried, to the Democratic party. 6. Mark Zuckerberg's 𝕏 rival, Threads, has seen a massive decline in users; Elon Musk suggests bots were used to inflate initial sign-up numbers. 5. Office for National Statistics report reveals that COVID vaccinated have 91% higher death risk than the unvaccinated. 4. Senators Mitch McConnell (81) and Dianne Feinstein (90) suffer senile episodes on public display, raising concerns on term limits. 3. LeBron James' son Bronny James (18) suffers cardiac arrest and grammy winner Tori Kelly (30) hospitalized with blood clots around heart. 2. Biden White House, FBI, pressured Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to censor Americans. 1. Trump to impose Death Penalty on Human Traffickers when elected. Bonus: The Biden administration has sent more than $100 billion in U.S. weaponry and financial aid to Ukraine in less than a year.Radicals Threaten to Kill, Dismember School Board President for Adopting Parental Rights Policy
A local school board president has been inundated with threats that left-wing activists will dismember her, murder her children, and slaughter her pets. Her crime? Saying that teachers should not keep parents in the dark if their children begin to identify as transgender.
The new Chino Valley (California) Unified School District Board of Education policy states that school officials will notify parents in writing within three days if a child seeks to identify as a gender “other than the student’s biological sex,” use different pronouns, adopt a different name, use the restroom, or join a sports team of the opposite sex. The board adopted the resolution last Thursday, July 20, by a 4-1 vote, with member Donald Bridge casting the lone dissenting vote.
“The next morning, our district got a phone call” from an anonymous caller threatening “to kill me, and they said that they were going to dismember” school board president Sonja Shaw, the official revealed on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Monday. Police alerted Shaw to the threat shortly before a previous interview on the show, last Friday.
Then Shaw looked at her district email account, where she said she saw messages stating, “You’re going to die,” with a series of profane epithets. “Your children are going to die and your animals are going to die.” For a “point of reference, they would name what kind of animals I had,” Shaw added.
“I also got notification that people who identify as being in the terrorist organization Antifa posted on their website, ‘We declare war on Sonja Shaw,’” Shaw told Perkins, adding that the group posted her address. “They said, ‘We know where you sleep,’” the same message an angry mob screamed outside the home of Tucker Carlson in 2018. “They said things like, ‘Use all force possible to stop her.’”
“I’m not going to lie. I was shaking,” Shaw confided on Monday. Police had beefed up patrols around her home to ensure security, she said.
Burkean Nationalism by Kevin Roberts
The fight isn’t about the Left versus the Right; it’s the Left versus the West.
ational Conservatism was first born in England, and in the Brexit referendum of 2016, it won its greatest victory since the end of the Cold War.
Like the election of Donald Trump in the United States that same year, Brexit lifted the hopes and expanded the horizons of a more nationalist conservatism across the West. Unfortunately, Tories here, like the Republican Party back home, failed to harness that momentum and translate it into a reimagined governing agenda.
The lack of a clear, comprehensive policy program is always a challenge for a political coalition. For right-of-center parties in this era, it is a death wish.
The other side does not have this problem. They have a vision and an agenda and an obsession with imposing it on the world without the votes of legislatures or the consent of the governed.
The New Left—greedy, woke, elitist, and globalist—has foresworn every principle their ideological predecessors once espoused: democracy, equality, diversity, justice. It abjures religion—and Christianity especially—as well as the nation-state, political accountability, and even objective Truth. Their goal is not to win political contests but to end them altogether, to sweep away dissent and any subversive institution that dares facilitate it.